Guest post: How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Book by Heather Green

Tonight’s guest blog post, on the topic of marketing is brought to you by Heather Green.

How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Book

You don’t have to have a big marketing budget or a large publishing house behind you to promote your book and increase your sales. You can run your own marketing campaign with a shoestring budget – and even no budget – and watch your sales grow.

Social media is a fantastic tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs, including self-published or struggling authors. You can use it to spread the word about your book, potentially even garnering viral attention. Best of all: It’s free.

Here are a few simple ways you can use social media to promote your book and increase sales:

Create Multiple Profiles

Fans and followers use social media to advertise their tastes and preferences for their own friends and followers. They may want to “like” you as an author, or they may only be interested in one or a few of your books. Give them every opportunity to engage with you and your work in a way that they choose by creating multiple profiles: One for yourself as an author and one for each of your books.

Multiple profiles will also help you to focus your marketing efforts and to differentiate your promotions for each group of fans.

Share Previews

When you have a new book coming out, you can leverage social media to share previews to get fans excited to buy the full work. You can share sample chapters or passages, or you can even create a “trailer” for your book on YouTube and then share it through your other social media channels.

The key is to have a captive audience of fans and followers before you start posting these previews. Otherwise, you’ll be sharing them with a ghost audience…

Host Contests and Giveaways

Everyone likes to get something for free, and contests and giveaways are a great way to get people excited about your book. There are a number of ways you can use social media and contests to promote your book:

• Offer a free copy of your book to a random person who has “liked” your page or shared it.
• Offer free copies of your book to anyone who reviews it on their blog, including a free copy to give to one of their readers.
• Offer a free gift with your book to a random person who becomes your follower, shares your book on their blog, and so on.

You can think of dozens of varieties on this basic premise. The key is to reward your readers but to also encourage them to spread the word about your book.

Provide Opportunities for Sharing

Don’t forget the “social” part of social media when you start using it to promote your book. Give your fans plenty of opportunities to share your content with their own friends and followers.

Include sharing buttons within the content of your book – such as “like it” or “tweet this” buttons at the end of each chapter or on your footers – and include Facebook comment forms right in the chapters. Readers will be more compelled to act when they are in the process of reading your book. Take advantage of that momentum to get them to spread the word.

Build Relationships

Social media isn’t all about instant gratification. A large part of what makes social media marketing successful is building relationships. You should be putting in the work to connect with your fans and followers whether you have a new book to promote or not. You will encourage long-term relationships that will help you form a loyal reader base.

This will make it much easier to promote any new books you have in the future.

Social media is a valuable tool for authors looking to promote themselves and their work. Social media has only grown in popularity, and it provides authors a great way to connect with millions of potential readers. Use these strategies for promoting your book on social media, and you are sure to see your sales increase.

That was great (especially as I could tick some of the boxes). Thank you, Heather!

Heather Green is a Christian mom, freelance writer, pet lover and the resident blogger for OnlineNursingDegrees.org, a free informational website offering tips and advice about online nursing guides and online lpn program.

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If you would like to write a writing-related guest post for my blog then feel free to email me with an outline of what you would like to write about. If it’s writing-related then it’s highly likely I’d email back and say “yes please”.

The blog interviews return as normal tomorrow morning with romance author RC Bonitz – the five hundred and twenty-fifth of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, autobiographers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me.

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Unfortunately, as I post an interview a day (amongst other things) I can’t review books but I have a feature called ‘Short Story Saturdays’ where I review stories of up to 2,500 words. Alternatively if you have a short story or self-contained novel extract / short chapter (ideally up to 1000 words) that you’d like critiqued and don’t mind me reading it / talking about and critiquing it (I send you the transcription afterwards so you can use the comments or ignore them) 🙂 on my ‘Bailey’s Writing Tips’ podcast, then do email me. They are fortnightly episodes, usually released on Sundays, interweaving the recordings between the red pen sessions with the hints & tips episodes. I am now also looking for flash fiction (<1000 words) for Flash Fiction Fridays and poetry for Post-weekend Poetry.